Joomla! For Dummies E-Book

Seamus Bellamy

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 303

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Build template-based web sites without the hassle of writing code! Joomla! is a free, open source PHP & MySQL-based content management system that allows you to create interactive, community-based Web sites without having to write or program code in PHP or ASP.NET. This fun and friendly introduction to Joomla! shows you how to create a rich, interactive Web site that does not require any code. No matter your skill level, this easy-to-understand resource demonstrates how to drop preconfigured modules that already contain PHP and MySQL code directly into your Joomla! site. Thanks to the Dummies fun and friendly approach, you'll quickly see how easy to create a rich, interactive Web site with Joomla! * Demonstrates how to create a business site--complete with shopping cart--quickly and easily * Walks you through developing Web sites with discussions, RSS feeds, picture submissions, and more * Includes coverage of the newest version of Joomla!, explains its completely new administrative features, and reviews its ability to provide different levels of access to different users via much-requested access control lists Find out why Joomla! is the easiest way to build an interactive, community-based Web site!

Leseprobe

Joomla! For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/joomla to view this book's cheat sheet.

Table of Contents

Introduction

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Getting Started with Joomla

Part II: Joomla at Work

Part III: Working with Joomla Modules and Templates

Part IV: Joomla in the Real World

Part V: The Part of Tens

Foolish Assumptions

Conventions Used in This Book

Icons Used in This Book

What You’re Not to Read

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Getting Started with Joomla

Chapter 1: Essential Joomla

What Joomla Can Do for You

Sample Joomla Sites

Oklahoma State University

NZMac.com

Royal Oak Public Library

Jenerate.com

All about Content Management Systems

Good: Web pages with CSS

Better: Dynamic Web pages via CMS

Reasons to Choose Joomla

Loyal users

Ease of use

Minimal learning curve

Other advantages

Where to Jump into Joomla

Chapter 2: Getting and Installing Joomla

Getting Joomla

Downloading the software

Unzipping the software

Checking minimum requirements

Installing Joomla on a Host Server

Uploading the Joomla files

Setting up MySQL

Installing the Joomla software

Installing Joomla on Your Own Computer

The hard way: Installing components

The easy way: Installing XAMPP

Installing the Joomla program

Looking at Your New Joomla Site

Ordering from the menus

Touring the modules

Controlling the action

Chapter 3: Mastering the Front Page

Dissecting the Front Page

In the Power Seat: Working with the Administration Control Panel

Granting privileges

Logging in as administrator

Managing the managers

Creating Articles

Creating a new article

Tweaking article titles

Remodeling Modules

Navigating Module Manager

Removing and deleting modules

Modifying Menus

Removing menus

Renaming menus

Strike That: Removing Articles

Viewing articles

Filtering articles

Unpublishing articles

Part II: Joomla at Work

Chapter 4: Adding Web Pages to Your Site

Understanding the Structure of Joomla Web Sites

Setting up categories

Neat freak: nested categories

Laying out the site

Working with Uncategorized Articles

Creating an uncategorized article

Finding uncategorized articles

Linking Articles to Menu Items

Creating a menu item

Linking the menu item to an article

Testing the new menu item

Organizing with Categories

Creating a category

Organizing with Nested Categories

Creating a nested category

Adding articles to a new category or nested category

Choosing a Menu Structure

Option 1: Adding three menu items

Option 2: Adding a menu item that points to a category

Linking Menu Items to Categories

Creating Read More Links

Adjusting Article Order

Filtering articles

Reordering articles in Article Manager

Reordering articles in the Menu Items page

Who’s on First?: Setting Menu Item Position

Reviewing the example site

Changing the order of menu items

Removing menu items

Chapter 5: Building Navigation into Your Site with Menus

Finding Out about Joomla Menus

Under and Over: Creating Submenu Items

Creating the category and nested category pages

Creating target Web pages

Creating the parent menu item

Creating the submenu items

Changing article order in list layout

Working with List Layout

Creating the category

Creating the articles

Creating the menu item

Changing the order of menu items

Viewing the list layout

Choice, Choices: Taking Advantage of Menu Manager’s Parameter Panes

Required Settings pane

Category Options pane

Article Options pane

Setting Some Powerful Menu Options

Turning article titles into links

Setting menu access

Opening articles in new windows

Hiding author names

Showing article-to-article links

Setting Default Menu Items

Creating Menu Separators

Chapter 6: Mastering Web Page Creation

Working with Article Options

Parameters - Publishing Options

Parameters - Article Options

Article Permissions

Metadata Options

Getting to Know Your Editor

Dressing Up Your Articles with Emoticons and Images

Smile!: Adding emoticons

Adding images

Working with Media Manager

Organizing with folders

Uploading a picture

Inserting an image

Formatting Articles with HTML Tags

Working with Tables and Columns

Creating a table in an article

Formatting a table

Creating a Table of Contents

Back (And Forth) to the Future: Publishing at Different Times

Publishing articles in the future

Stopping publishing in the future

Unpublishing now

See You Later, Alligator: Taking the Site Offline

Part III: Working with Joomla Modules and Templates

Chapter 7: Get ting Started with Modules

All about Modules

Banner Component

Banners

Categories

Clients

Tracks

The Banners Module

Touring the module

Putting it all together

The Archive Articles Module: A Sense of History

Archiving articles

Displaying lists of archived articles

The Breadcrumbs Module: Like Hansel and Gretel

Doing It Yourself: The Custom HTML Module

Creating a Custom HTML module

The Feed Display Module: Getting RSS Your Way

Chapter 8: More Modules: Who, What, and Where

The Login Module: Getting Users on Board

Most Read Content

The Random Image Module: Adding a Little Art

The Articles — Related Articles Module: Unlocking the Keywords

The Search Module: Finding a Needle in a Haystack

Using the search controls

Making search more user-friendly

The Articles Categories Module: Great for Overviews

The Syndication Feeds Module: Creating RSS Feeds

The Who’s Online Module: Anyone There?

The Wrapper Module & Menu Item: Displaying Other Sites

Part IV: Joomla in the Real World

Chapter 9: Laying Out Your Web Pages with Joomla Templates

Formatting Joomla Sites with Templates

Template Central: Template Manager

Working with the Styles tab

Working with the Templates tab

Changing the Default Template

Editing a Built-In Template

Customizing a template

Editing a template’s code

Working with New Joomla Templates

Finding and downloading a new template

Installing a new template

Chapter 10: Managing Your Web Site’s Users

Introducing the Wonderful World of Joomla Users

Managing Users with User Manager

Creating registered users

Creating Authors

Sample content: Shop suppliers & customers

Creating Editors

Creating Publishers

Creating Managers

Creating administrators

Creating Super Users

Building a Contact Page

Adding contacts to your site

Organizing Contacts with Contact Manager

Creating a contact category

Creating a contact page

Managing Site E-Mail

Allowing Users to Manage Themselves

Creating user-management pages

Allowing users to edit their accounts

Chapter 11: Driving Traffic to Your Web Site with Search Engine Optimization

Understanding Search Engines and Spiders

Making Joomla URLs Search Engine Friendly

Using mod_rewrite to configure URLs

Working with Aliases

Unlocking the Secrets of Keywords

Finding keywords to use

Adding keywords as metadata

Entering other metadata

Optimizing Pages with Templates

Maximizing Your Site for Search Engines

Telling Search Engines about Your Site

Putting Up Road Signs: Redirect Manager

Chapter 12: Extending Joomla

Taking a Look at Plug-Ins, Components, and Modules

Making a splash with modules

Working with components

Plugging away with plug-ins

Searching for Joomla Extensions

Using the search box

Browsing by categories

Browsing by links

Choosing an Extension

Picking the right platform

Knowing what you’re getting

Checking the ratings

Downloading a Joomla Extension

Installing a Component

Finding and Installing a Module

Installing a Plug-In

Life Made Easy: Installation Packages

Part V: The Part of Tens

Chapter 13: Blast From The Past: Ten Top Joomla 1.5 Extensions

VirtueMart

Google Maps Module or Plug-in

Joom!Fish

JCE Editor

Attachments for Content Articles

Akeeba Backup Core

Projectfork

hwdVideoShare

Phoca Gallery

JEvents Events Calendar

Chapter 14: Ten Ways to Get Help on Joomla

Joomla Help Site

Joomla Official Documentation Wiki

Joomla Forums

Joomla Community Portal

Joomla User Groups

Joomla Translation Teams

Joomla Quick Start Guides

Joomla Quick Start Videos

Joomla Tutorials

Joomla Beginners

Chapter 15: Ten Top Joomla Template Sites

SiteGround

Joomla-Templates.com

Joomlashack

Joomla24.com

JoomlaShine

JoomlaTP.com

Template Monster

Best of Joomla

JoomlArt.com

Compass Designs

Glossary

Cheat Sheet

Joomla! For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

by Seamus Bellamy

Joomla! For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2011 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010943060

ISBN: 978-0-470-59902-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Author

Seamus Bellamy is a writer, web designer, and scofflaw educated at the University of King’s College in Halifax. His diverse resume includes time spent working in the intelligence community, private sector security, and as a journalist. His work is published on a regular basis both domestically and internationally, most notably in Mac|Life Magazine and Irish Music Magazine. Seamus is a proud Gaelic speaker, a technology enthusiast, and has been known to play a mean bodhran and bouzouki — although not at the same time.

Dedication

Many thanks to Lynn Beighley for the moral and technical support, and of course, to my family — thank you for enduring over three decades of fountain pens, skullduggery, and laptops.

Author’s Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Kathy Simpson, Beth Taylor, Eric vanBok, and Kyle Looper of Wiley for their tireless efforts on this book, as well as the Joomla community for its invaluable assistance in filling in many of the details.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax [phone].

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Beth Taylor

Acquisitions Editor: Kyle Looper

Copy Editor: Beth Taylor

Technical Editor: Eric vanBok

Editorial Manager: Jodi Jensen

Editorial Assistant: Amanda Graham

Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case

Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)

Composition Services

Project Coordinator: Sheree Montgomery

Layout and Graphics: Thomas Borah, Carl Byers, Vida Noffsinger

Proofreaders: Jessica Kramer, The Well-Chosen Word

Indexer: Christine Karpeles

Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies

Richard Swadley, Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher

Mary Bednarek, Executive Acquisitions Director

Mary C. Corder, Editorial Director

Publishing for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher

Composition Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Introduction

Joomla (the exclamation point Joomla! won’t be used in the text of this book, for the sake of making it more readable,) gives you total control of your Web site — the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. In turn, this book gives you total control of Joomla.

Today, users are demanding more from Web sites. It’s not enough to have static text on your Web site — not if you want a steady stream of visitors. You’ve got to update your pages continually, making your site fresh and keeping it new. You’ve got to have an attractively, professionally formatted site. You’ve got to have tons of extras: polls and e-mail signups and newsflashes and menus, and more.

Who can afford the time to maintain a site like that and write the content too?

Now you can. Content Management Systems (CMSes) like Joomla allow people put together spectacular sites with very little work.

Want to publish a new article on your site? No problem. Want to let users rate your articles with a clickable bar of stars? Also no problem. Want to link your articles with a cool system of drop-down menus? Joomla’s got you covered. Interested in allowing people to log into your site to gain special privileges? You can do that too. Have you wanted to let users search every page on your site? Yep — no problem at all.

CMSes are all the rage on the Internet these days: They give you the complete framework of a Web site and allow you to manage it professionally with a few clicks. All you have to do is provide the content — such as text, images, and videos — that you want to display. Using a CMS is as easy as typing in a word processor (in fact, one way to think of CMSes is as word processors for the Web) but a lot more fun.

The CMS of choice these days is Joomla, which is what this book is all about. Joomla is free and dramatically powerful. Want a site that looks as though a Fortune 500 company is behind it? With Joomla, you can whip one up in no time at all. You’re going to find that not only is Joomla free but it’s also remarkably trouble free.

In the old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML. Now, Joomla takes care of all the details for you, allowing you to concentrate on the content of your site instead of struggling with the details of how that content is presented.

Welcome to the new era of web publishing.

How This Book Is Organized

Joomla is a big topic. Here are the various parts you’re going to see coming up.

Part I: Getting Started with Joomla

In Part 1, you get a grasp for the basics. You’ll be given an overview of Joomla and see where it’s been put to work in Web sites both nationally and internationally.

You also see how to get Joomla (for free) and install it. This process can take a little doing, so Chapter 2 is devoted to the topic.

Finally, Part 1 illustrates how you can jump right into Joomla, customizing the home page (called the front page on Joomla sites) by installing your own logo, adding text, modifying navigation menus, and more.

Part II: Joomla at Work

This part gives you the skills you need to put Joomla to work every day. We start this part with a chapter on the most basic of Web-site skills: creating your own pages and customizing them with text and images.

In this part, you also see how to work with menus. Menu items are very powerful in Joomla. Believe it or not, a Web page can’t even exist on a Joomla site unless a menu item points to it — and menu items actually determine the layout of the Web pages they point to.

Part III: Working with Joomla Modules and Templates

Joomla comes packed with dozens of built-in modules that give you extraordinary power. These modules include search, polls, menus, newsflashes, and banners. This part is where you see how to use all the modules that come with Joomla.

Part III also looks at how to work with Joomla templates. Templates create the actual layout of your pages: what goes where, how modules are positioned, where the page content is displayed, what images and color schemes are used, and more. Although Joomla comes with only a few templates, thousands more are available on the Internet.

Part IV: Joomla in the Real World

This part takes you into the real world, dealing with real people. Joomla supports eight levels of users, and in this part, we show you how to manage them.

We also take a look at how to get users to come to your site through search engine optimization — the process of making your site friendly to search engines to get a high ranking. This topic is a big one in Joomla.

Finally, we discuss how to extend Joomla with extensions. Although the software is very powerful out of the box, thousands of extensions are just waiting to be installed — everything from games to complete shopping-cart systems, from site-map generators to multilingual content managers.

Part V: The Part of Tens

In Part V, we list ten top Joomla extensions, ten places to get Joomla help online, ten top sources of Joomla templates, and ten places to find Joomla tutorials.

Foolish Assumptions

We don’t assume in this book that you have a lot of Web-site design experience. You don’t need to know any HTML or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code to read and use this book.

We do assume that you have a Web site and that you can upload files to it, however. You’re going to need that skill to create a Joomla site, so if you’re unfamiliar with the process of uploading files to your Internet service provider, ask your provider’s tech staff for help.

That’s all you need, though. Joomla takes care of the rest.

Conventions Used in This Book

Some books have a dozen dizzying conventions that you need to know before you can even start. Not this one. All you need to know is that new terms are given in italics, like this, the first time they’re discussed.

Icons Used in This Book

You’ll find a few icons in this book, and here’s what they mean.

This icon marks an extra hint for more Joomla power.

This icon marks something you should remember to make sure you’re getting the most out of Joomla.

This icon means that what follows is technical, insider stuff. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, but if you want to become a Joomla pro (and who doesn’t?), take a look.

This icon warns you of things to be super-careful about!

What You’re Not to Read

You don’t have to read some elements if you don’t want to — that is, Technical Stuff elements. Technical Stuff paragraphs give you a little more insight into what’s going on, but you can skip reading them if you want to. Your guided tour of the world of Joomla won’t suffer at all.

Where to Go from Here

You’re all set now, ready to jump into Chapter 1. You don’t have to start there, though; you can jump in anywhere you like. Joomla for Dummies is written to allow you to do just that. But if you want to get the full Joomla story from the beginning, start with Chapter 1, which is where all the action starts.

Please note that some special symbols used in this eBook may not display properly on all eReader devices. If you have trouble determining any symbol, please call Wiley Product Technical Support at 800-762-2974. Outside of the United States, please call 317-572-3993. You can also contact Wiley Product Technical Support at www.wiley.com/techsupport.

Part I

Getting Started with Joomla

In this part . . .

This part is where you begin putting Joomla to work. First, we give you an overview of Joomla as it’s used today around the world. Then we show you how to get and install Joomla.

Finally, we dig into Joomla by helping you master the home page of any Joomla site — that’s the front page, in Joomla lingo. You see how to add your own text to the front page, change the front page’s logo, sling the menu items around, and more.